UVa 10920 Spiral Tap gave me quite a bit of grief. What appeared to be a simple simulation pproblem resulted in several TL submissions and many hours of banging my head against my desk before I could find a fast enough solution. Thus my new philsophy: “The more bruises on your head, the more progress you’re making”.

I did not think that UVa 10258: Contest Scoreboard was a well-written problem. The problem statement did not specify the expected behavior well. I imagine this problem was the subject of many clarification requests when it was used in competition. Then again, I probably just need to practice reading problem statements carefully.

UVa 11933: Splitting Numbers problem summary: Given a number n, print out a and b, where a is the number constructed from every other set bit of n and b is constructed from the other half of the set bits. This problem is simple to implement, but in my case I screwed the implementation up and made things a lot harder for myself.

I solved UVa 978: Lemmings Battle! with a multiset. A multiset has the same underlying implementation as a regular STL set (BST), but it can store multiple copies of the same value, which makes it perfect for modelling these lemmings.